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In April 1955, twenty-nine countries from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East came together for a diplomatic conference in Bandung, Indonesia, intending to define the direction of the postcolonial world. Representing approximately two-thirds of the world’s population, the Bandung conference occurred during a key moment of transition in the mid-twentieth century—amid the global wave of decolonization that took place after the Second World War and the nascent establishment of a new cold war world order in its wake. Participants such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Zhou Enlai of China, and Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia seized this occasion to attempt the creation of a political alternative to the dual threats of Western neocolonialism and the cold war interventionism of the United States and the Soviet Union.

The essays in this volume explore the diverse repercussions of this event, tracing the diplomatic, intellectual, and sociocultural histories that have emanated from it. Making a World after Empire consequently addresses the complex intersection of postcolonial history and cold war history and speaks to contemporary discussions of Afro-Asianism, empire, and decolonization, thus reestablishing the conference’s importance in twentieth-century global history.

Contributors: Michael Adas, Laura Bier, James R. Brennan, G. Thomas Burgess, Antoinette Burton, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Julian Go, Christopher J. Lee, Jamie Monson, Jeremy Prestholdt, Denis M. Tull

The Eisenhower administration’s intervention in Guatemala is one of the most closely studied covert operations in the history of the Cold War. Yet we know far more about the 1954 coup itself than its aftermath. This book uses the concept of “counterrevolution” to trace the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to restore U.S. hegemony in a nation whose reform governments had antagonized U.S. economic interests and the local elite.

Comparing the Guatemalan case to U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutions in Iran, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, and Chile reveals that Washington’s efforts to roll back “communism” in Latin America and elsewhere during the Cold War represented in reality a short-term strategy to protect core American interests from the rising tide of Third World nationalism.

Marginalizing Colonialism offers a social, political, and spatial history of Bolgatanga, a northern Ghanaian town whose colonial-era urban development has been largely overlooked in African historiography. Covering the late nineteenth century through the 1940s, the book traces how this settlement—long characterized as a remote hinterland of the British Empire—emerged as a commercial and political center in the region. Rather than depicting urbanization as an imperial project, it reveals how African actors actively shaped Bolgatanga’s growth and repeatedly marginalized, redirected, and evaded colonial authority.

The narrative follows Bolgatanga’s transformation from a dispersed settlement organized around kinship, ritual geographies, and earth shrines into a dynamic urban hub integrated into regional trade networks. Central to this shift were new land tenure systems, commercial expansion, and changing spatial practices. By the 1930s and 1940s, trade in kola, groundnuts, livestock, and other goods surged, stimulated by new roads and increased mobility. Population growth converted farmland into leased plots, permanent buildings replaced older compounds, and areas around the market became focal points of economic and social life.

These changes were driven not by the colonial state but rather by local negotiations and strategic adaptations. Chiefs, earth priests, merchants, and migrant traders mediated and reshaped colonial policies, while missionaries and settlers concluded land agreements beyond official oversight. Roads and marketplaces, planned through negotiations between colonial officials and local chiefs and built largely through African labor, became central infrastructures of local economic life. Even as colonial administrators sought to codify land tenure and regulate commerce, their influence remained largely nominal—a background presence in a story propelled by African initiative.

Drawing on archival documents, oral histories, and unpublished manuscripts by local intellectuals, Marginalizing Colonialism provides the first comprehensive urban history of Bolgatanga. It challenges dominant narratives in African colonial and urban historiography by exposing the silences of the colonial archive and highlighting the significance of medium-sized towns as arenas of negotiation and creativity. Ultimately, the book argues that Bolgatanga’s urbanization was a locally driven process that redefined power, space, and governance—leaving a legacy that continues to shape the city’s identity and regional role today.

1993 Mid-South Sociological Association Book Award

Robert E. Park has long been recognized as one of the most influential thinkers in early American sociology, yet virtually all of his works appearing before 1913 were published in popular magazines and were dismissed as nonsociological muckraking. In Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation: An Analysis and Interpretation of the Early Writings of Robert E. Park, Stanford M. Lyman examines and reprints many of these little-known works, including Park’s essays on German military organization, his exposés of the atrocities committed by Belgium’s Leopold II in the Congo State, his studies of the black community in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and of Booker T. Washington’s agricultural education program at Tuskegee, Alabama.

Lyman shows clearly that Park’s essays, written outside the academy, formulated a far more complex perspective on modern modes of evil than any proposed by his contemporaries, thereby influencing sociological debates for decades to come. By writing his essays on topical subjects and by publishing them for a public audience, Park dramatized his profound belief that the struggle to achieve racial accommodation and to establish a true and lasting democracy is a concern for all.

Moving Subjects is the first of its kind to make a case not simply for the necessity of a spatial analysis of imperial formations, but for the indispensability of an investigative approach that links space and movement with the domain of the intimate. Through careful archival research and a commitment to excavating the variety of "mobile intimacies" at the heart of imperial power, its agents, and its interlocutors, contributors offer new evidence and approaches for scholars engaged in capturing the historical nuances of imperial domination.

Contributors are Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Adrian Carton, David Haines, Katherine Ellinghaus, Charlotte Macdonald, Michael A. McDonnell, Kirsten McKenzie, Michelle Moran, Fiona Paisley, Adele Perry, Dana Rabin, Christine M. Skwiot, Rachel Standfield, Frances Steel, Elizabeth Vibert, and Kerry Wynn.